As the price of enterprise-grade storage continues to plummet and what’s available continues to improve as Moore’s law arguably continues apace, what lies ahead in 2016 in the enterprise storage market?

SanDisk Corp.’s Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy, Data Center Solutions, Gary Lyng believes that cost will be a defining factor in flash drive adoption, along with the rise of 3D NAND architecture and software-defined storage going mainstream.

In the latest of our series of 2016 predictions, here’s what Lyng predicts for the year ahead.

Cost will drive adoption

Lyng believes that cost is ultimately what drives the speed of new technology adoptions.

“As the cost of flash declines, we believe flash adoption in the enterprise will continue to grow as a result,” he predicts. “In many instances, it’s not just long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) that makes flash more cost efficient – it’s actual purchase price or Total Cost of Acquisition (TCA) of equipment that’s cheaper with SSDs.”

He adds: “Having a better solution is just a bonus, and the role of flash as primary storage should be firmly established.”

Profitability will directly correlate to ‘fast data’ processing

Organizations are not just contending with Big Data and the demands of the exponential growth in capacity, but the need for “fast data” — data that is ready to be analyzed and mined as close to real time as possible, according to Lyng.

“In 2016, infrastructure will have to respond as fast as the user, and businesses will rely on speed to make sure revenue is not lost,” he sys. “They will need to retain existing customers by delivering best-in-class experiences, and they will need the ability to capitalize on opportunities by utilizing collected data in the timeliest fashion before the opportunity is gone.”

3D NAND architecture will gain traction

Lyng believes that 3D NAND technology will be the next wave for flash technology development.

“In 2016, we’ll begin to see 3D flash starting to infuse flash-enabled devices and systems with high levels of performance and storage capacity,” he notes, before predicting that the end result will be “more storage inside laptops and smartphones, speed and precision in Big Data processing, near real-time online experiences – and increased momentum toward the Internet of Things (IoT).”

Application design will evolve

“As flash continues to penetrate the enterprise, those all-flash environments will lead to a massive boost in app response times and performance,” says Lyng. “But in order for that to happen first, applications will need to be better written for flash.”

He adds, “We will see that shift take off next year due with a more streamlined design process allowing application developers to take advantage of the faster data processing abilities of flash to build apps that are far more powerful and offer a much richer experience.”

Networking will continue to get faster

“The network is no longer the bottleneck and we’re going to see more enterprises looking to upgrade their infrastructure,” Lyng confidently states. “It is also now facilitating data movement to the right layer; as it’s getting faster, the demand on the server will be greater and flash adoption will be bigger.”

Software-defined storage will go mainstream

Lyng’s final prediction is that if an enterprise hasn’t already deployed Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and data center orchestration layers like OpenStack, they will in 2016.

“We’re seeing a lot of converged systems relying on flash for performance being deployed in 2016, with flash performance compensating for the overhead of better management and abstraction, and VMware’s recently released Virtual SAN 6.0 finally allows performance critical apps to take advantage of flash. All of this sets the stage for even more server consolidation enabled by flash,” he said.

Image credit: SanDisk